Italy: fascist sci-fi

Demonstrations at the G 8 summit in Genoa and a brutal response by the authorities put Italy in the news. But Italians are increasingly turning away from politics. In this vacuum, the far-right has co-opted the fantasy genre to express its darkest dreams.

I have long maintained that science fiction tells us more about the real world than mainstream literature (1) and two books just published in Italy confirm this. The first, Fantasfascismo (2), is an anthology edited by Gianfranco De Turris. Apart from a couple of ironic pieces, all the contributions are just what the title says - fascist fantasies. De Turris is a leading member of a foundation named after the antisemitic philosopher Julius Evola (3), and his publishers, Settimo Sigillo, specialise in the works of rightwing extremists. The second book, Occidente (4) by Mario Farneti, sets out to show how much stronger Italy would have been if Mussolini had survived.

It is only a few months since these books came out and already Italy’s government is a democratic nightmare. Gianfranco Fini, the deputy prime minister, and Umberto Bossi, minister for institutional reform and devolution, are proposing to criminalise illegal immigration - to loud applause from the popular press, which calls for Italian society to be “purified”, praises colonialism and racial segregation, and readily excuses police brutality.

Fini’s National Alliance (AN) wants homosexual teachers banned. Members of Bossi’s Northern League have let pigs urinate on a mosque building site, sprayed black prostitutes with disinfectant, unbolted park benches to stop immigrants sitting on them, and sent their activists to guard the borders. One of its leaders, Mario Borghezio, a former member of the Nazi group Ordine Nuove and a convert to Catholic fundamentalism, has proposed the authorities take the footprints of Africans entering Italy and keep them on file.

The minister of justice, Roberto Castelli, is an example of the League’s drift towards fascism. His first response to the events in Genoa this July was to recommend that the courts go easy on the young soldier on military service who shot dead a 23-year-old protester, Carlo Giuliani, during the G8 summit [as the authorities (...)